Pro-Palestine activism received a respite from longstanding official and unofficial repression in Britain this week with a legal order to overturn a government ban on Palestine Action, an activist organization that was banned in the summer of 2025. The High Court ruled that the ban was unlawful, giving some relief to thousands of people who had been imprisoned under the ban.

Aiming to challenge Britain’s armament of Israel through direct action, Palestine Action was founded in the early 2020s by Huda Ammori, a British researcher and activist of Palestinian-Iraqi stock, and Richard Barnard. Urgency was lent to their work by the subsequent genocide that began in Gaza from 2023, to which the British government and assorted weapons companies were linked. In a remarkable leap, the government cited the group’s raid on an arms manufacturer’s Bristol warehouse as evidence of its terrorist nature. The result was that thousands of people, including many pensioners, were imprisoned for public solidarity with the group, which the government presented as support for terrorism.

The legal proceedings launched by the British state, first under Yvette Cooper, who has since been given the foreign minister’s role, and then under Shabana Mahmood, have been notable for a reliance on rhetoric, with “terrorism” the most obvious example, instead of legal rights and facts. Even in court, the Palestine Action legal team was at first deprived of key footage that showed armed guards bearing down on the activists who had supposedly “assaulted” them: footage with the potential to turn the claim of unprovoked assault by the “terrorist” activists on its head. Unsurprisingly, the court ruled against the ban.

Yet, the case of Palestine Action is simply part of a major campaign to crack down against Palestine support and criticism of Israel that the British state has pursued since the genocide ended. Owing to Britain’s relative familiarity with the Middle East, where its colonial conquest and misrule of the region during and immediately after the World Wars set in motion the foundation of Israel amid a mass expulsion of Palestinians, there has long been a relatively informed debate on the issue of the type that is rare across the Atlantic in the United States. In the period since, Britain has usually at least overtly avoided the tasteless partisanship with Israel characteristic of the United States.

However, this has changed enormously in the past twenty years. It changed first under Tony Blair (1997-2007), whose New Labour regime eagerly identified itself with pro-Israel neoconservatives in Washington, and who even after leaving office has personally been an unofficial eminence grise in Anglo-American policy toward the Muslim world, most recently as the prospective viceroy for Donald Trump’s grotesquely misnamed “Board of Peace” that aims to turn the wreckage of Gaza into a “pacified” colony.

Israeli Encroachment During the Tory Decade

The process intensified during the 2010s, a decade dominated by the right-wing Tory party, whose leaders were each closely identified with Israel, though some more than others. One particularly noxious mainstay was the rabidly anti-Muslim minister Michael Gove, who, as education minister, whipped up an entirely contrived Green Scare about Muslim schools acting as a societal fifth column, and also spearheaded the “Brexit” campaign to leave Europe that produced major economic repercussions for which Muslims, immigrants, and minorities more generally are repeatedly blamed. Unsurprisingly, Gove is also a major cheerleader of Israel, recently suggesting that the Israeli military be given a prize for its supposed clemency in genociding Gaza.

Such ministers and other pro-Israel networksput constant pressure on British policy, as well as institutions such as the state-sponsored media outlet British Broadcasting Corporation, in a more pro-Israel direction. Less personally extreme figures also fell into line: cases in point were successive prime ministers David Cameron (2010-16) and Theresa May (2016-19).

May, who had been interior minister during Gove’s crusade against Muslim schools before succeeding Cameron, was nonetheless seen as insufficiently malleable: in November 2017, she had to dismiss her own interior minister, Gove’s frequent collaborator Priti Patel, for unauthorized secret meetings with Israeli leaders. In turn, the infamous American powerbroker, sex trafficker, and undisguised supporter of Israel, Jeffrey Epstein, conspired against her with her successor and then-foreign minister, Boris Johnson, and with far-right ideologue Steve Bannon.

Johnson’s own interior minister, Suella Braverman, was as ruthless a partisan of Israel as Patel: as soon as the genocide began in autumn 2023, she ordered a draconian crackdown, characterized by dogwhistling rhetoric and spurious targeting of even mild dissidence. Her cabinet colleague, defence minister Grant Shapps, arranged weapons transfers to Israel at the same time as his daughter was publicly denouncing pro-Palestine activism as a threat to Jews. This, despite the sizeable number of Jewish activists in such activism: their struggle, like that of pro-Palestine activists of other faiths, was discounted.

Braverman resigned after lambasting her own police for what she considered insufficient ruthlessness, and has since left the Tories to join the far-right party of Nigel Farage, the rabble-rouser whose views include vilification of foreigners and support of Israel, and to whom Bannon and Epstein were also linked. Farage forms part of a circle of far-right figures that pressure successive regimes to move further right and, among other things, to side with Israel. They include fascist-curious polemicist Douglas Murray and nativist thug “Tommy Robinson” Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, both of whom have since the 2000s whipped up hatred against Muslims and have gone out of their way to cheerlead Israel, frequently meeting with its officials and echoing its propaganda, since the genocide began in 2023.

Nativism with International Links

This propaganda, often relying on Artificial Intelligence-generated imagery and blatant invective, often overlaps with anti-Muslim state propaganda from India and the United Arab Emirates. India has been ruled since 2014 by the far-right Bharatiya Janata Party, which has often made violent anti-Muslim agitation a centrepiece of its policy and is, once more, particularly close with Israel. Patel and Braverman, the former British interior ministers who have so unabashedly pinned their flags to the Israeli mast, both support Modi.

The Emirates, whose Mohammad bin Zayed is infamous for an international antipathy against “political Islam”, which usually overlaps with any Muslim presence but the most obeisant to him, has likewise whipped up agitation against Muslims in the West: anti-Muslim circles frequently cite its foreign minister Abdullah bin Zayed, the ruler’s brother, when he criticized the West for its supposed tolerance of Muslim extremists. These are all talking points meant to increase pressure on Muslims in the West, as Murray has advocated for at least twenty years, and in turn dampen opposition to Western support for Israeli policy.

The crackdown on Palestine Action, and similarly heavy-handed clampdowns in France and Germany, are thus the result of years of pressure by foreign governments and local nativists, invariably linked to support of Israel.

Along with a web of ostensibly private actors linked to Israel’s government, Israeli ambassadors have constantly pressured Britain to crack down more robustly: its ambassador Mark Regev’s push to censor the presentation she arranged of a pro-Palestine Jewish speaker helped push Ammori, the Palestine Action founder, to more direct activism. This blatant case of interference in a private campus was just part of the steady inroads into British institutions that Israel’s supporters made during the Tory years. These inroads threaten the party structure itself: this winter, Robert Jenrick, another particular Israel cheerleader seen as a rising star within the Tories, was forced out of the party by its leader, Kemi Badenoch, after another plot; like Braverman, he joined Farage.

None of this is to signify moderation on the part of the plotters’ targets: with a singular lack of self-respect, the Tory leaders targeted by pro-Israel competitors have themselves gone out of their way to kowtow to Tel Aviv. Badenoch has shrilly supported Israel’s “fight against Islamist terror”, while Cameron, who had been forced to resign by Gove’s Brexit misadventure, returned to serve as foreign minister in 2024 and took such a skewed pro-Israel stance that he is even reported to have threatened the International Criminal Court’s head Karim Khan. Ironically, and underlining the regularity with which Israel’s supporters turn on one another, Khan had himself been first supported by Israel’s supporters but outraged them by investigating South African accusations of genocide.

A Laborious Campaign of Persecution

Nor should corrosively slavish partisanship to Israel be considered an exclusively Tory malady: under Keir Starmer, whose Labour party has ruled since 2024, the state has only doubled down. Starmer took over the party after his leftist predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, had been viciously smeared with, among other things, spurious accusations of anti-Semitism for his outspoken sympathy with Palestine. At the outset of the genocide, Starmer infamously endorsed Israel’s right to block the Palestinians from water, and his regime has continued its predecessor’s policy of crackdowns and frivolous “lawfare” against pro-Palestine activism. These reached a state of farce in autumn 2025 when a police ban on a notoriously violent far-right Israeli club, which had already attacked Muslims abroad, prompted keening howls of grief and outrage about alleged anti-Semitism virtually across a British political elite – only for Israel itself to cancel a local match with the club from fears of violence. The fact that legitimate fears about a demonstrably violent set of anti-Muslim hooligans could be reimagined and portrayed across the British political spectrum as anti-Semitism underscored the state of obeisance to which the British elite has subjected itself.

This month, Starmer was forced to dismiss his ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, a longstanding intimate of both Blair and Epstein, already controversial before his close ties to the latter were unearthed. The revelations also prompted a gaffe from minister Wes Streeting, who had only very narrowly held onto his seat against Palestinian activist Leanne Mohamad in the 2024 election. By his own admission, no “shrinking violet” on Israel, Streeting released his 2025 texts to Mandelson, which showed his knowledge of Israel’s “rogue state behaviour” that “Israel is committing war crimes before our eyes”. These texts show that ministers were privately aware that the same critics they were persecuting at home were correct in their condemnation of Israel and the British links to it.

The regime has been far more sensitive to far-right agitation by Farage and Robinson, which relied heavily on the same anti-Muslim propaganda promoted by Israel: the 2020s have seen a series of protests and riots aimed at foreigners in general and Muslims most specifically, gleefully supported by far-right oligarch Elon Musk who has regularly promoted, even with the most childish attempts, the claim that Muslim immigration is destroying Britain. Rather than confront these head-on, the British government has tried to prove their patriotism with more and more draconian crackdowns that, in their haste to classify political opponents as terrorists, intersect with the crackdown on such groups as Palestine Action. That any number of corrosive, destructive precedents that bode ill for British institutions and public life are being set seems to be of no concern.

Conclusion

Palestine was impacted by Britain during the colonial period, but today the genocide in Palestine has reverberated right back into British politics, into its streets, and its public discourse. The tumultuous events of mid-2020s Britain have not only shown a moral rot at the heart of British politics, but also the fact that steadfastness of the sort that Palestine Action so sturdily displayed under so much maliciously constructed pressure, ultimately pays off.

As Allah tells us in the Quran:

“And say, ‘Truth has come, and falsehood has departed. Indeed is falsehood, [by nature], ever bound to depart.” [Surah Al’Isra: 17;81]

 

Related:

– Damning Report On PREVENT Program In The UK

– Quranic Verses For Steadfastness For The Valiant Protesters On Campus